Testimony is continuing May 7 in the trial of Karen Read after prosecutors played enraged, profanity-laden voicemails the Massachusetts woman left her boyfriend in the hours before his body was discovered in the snow.
Read, 45, is accused of hitting Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe with her Lexus SUV and leaving him for dead in the snow outside the home of a fellow cop in January 2022.
Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino returned to the stand on May 6 and walked jurors through the eight voicemails and more than 50 unanswered calls and texts from Read to O'Keefe after midnight and up until 6 a.m., around the time his body was found. In the messages, Read vacillates between accusing her boyfriend of about two years of cheating, calling him a loser, a pervert and desperately asking where he is.
Jurors also heard from investigators who collected blood at the scene using red Solo cups and sifted through snow to find pieces of broken taillight. Read's lawyers say their investigation was marred by bias and incompetence and Read was framed by police.
Read's case has turned into a years-long whodunnit legal saga that has garnered massive intrigue from true-crime fans across the country, spurring an array of podcasts, movies, and television shows. The former financial professor is back in court after a 2024 trial ended in a hung jury.
Jessica Hyde, a digital forensics examiner, said a key witness searched "hos (sic) long to die in cold" after O'Keefe was found unconscious, not before as the defense has suggested.
Hyde said a tab was opened on Jennifer McCabe's phone at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 29 and multiple searches were made at some point, including for sporting events, a video of the song It's Raining Men and two crucial, misspelled questions "hos (sic) long to die in the cold" and "how long ti die in cikd (sic)"
McCabe is a star witness for the prosecution who testified that she heard Read say "I hit him, I hit him, I hit him," that morning and shared vivid details about discovering the body of "one of her closest friends."
Hyde said "there is a really scary danger" that an untrained examiner might assume the search was made at 2:27 a.m., but the timestamp actually reflects when the tab was first opened or backgrounded. "You could erroneously implicate a search was done hours or even days before it actually occurred. Some of us leave our tabs open forever," she said.
Hyde said "hos (sic) long to die in cold" was actually the final search made in the tab at 6:24 a.m. O'Keefe was found around 6 a.m.
Hyde is the second expert to tell jurors this search was made after 6 a.m. Ian Whiffin, a digital intelligence expert with the company Cellebrite, testified on April 28 that forensic data showed the Google search occurred at about 6:23 a.m. Whiffin gave a live demonstration of why, according to his analysis, the earlier timestamp is inaccurate.
Connor Keefe, a Massachusetts State Police trooper assigned to the Norfolk County District Attorney's office homicide unit, showed jurors more pieces of evidence found near the area where O'Keefe was found lying in the snow.
Keefe, who was tasked with bagging evidence uncovered by the team searching the lawn and street in front of 34 Fairview Road, unsealed evidence bags in court containing a shoe and pieces of broken taillight found at the scene. Jurors previously heard from the leader of the search team that sifted through the snow using rakes and brooms to find the evidence.
Keefe also attended the autopsy of O'Keefe, which he said is common practice for law enforcement. On cross-examination, Read's attorney attempted to question Keefe about injuries to O'Keefe's arm seen during the autopsy, but faced repeated objections from the prosecution.
Keefe said he did not provide a theory of what happened to O'Keefe to the medical examiner, but agreed he provided information to her during the autopsy.
A judge agreed to keep testimony from the Sandra Birchmore case, another notorious death in Canton, out of the Karen Read murder trial.
Birchmore's death, initially ruled a suicide, is now a federal case against former Stoughton cop Matthew Farwell. Prosecutors came around to what family and friends of Birchmore had said from the beginning: Farwell killed her and made the scene look like she had taken her own life. Farwell has pleaded not guilty.
Guarino, who has testified multiple times in Read's second trial, worked both cases.
Guarino initially failed to identify any messages from Farwell's phones to Birchmore. Investigators later revealed 32,709 messages between the two from December 2019 to her death in February 2021. Critics say Guarino botched data analysis in the O'Keefe case as well.
In a Tuesday, May 6 ruling, Judge Beverly Cannone sided with prosecutors who argued that "[t]estimony about this unrelated death investigation would result in a trial within a trial, with much information being inadmissible, confidential or offered without a proper foundation."
Cannone left a loophole: If "the door is opened" to Birchmore-related testimony, it could theoretically be allowed into Read's second trial
CourtTV has been covering the case against Read and the criminal investigation since early 2022, when O'Keefe's body was found outside a Canton home.
You can watch CourtTV's live feed of the Read trial proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. Proceedings begin at 9 a.m. ET.
Contributing: Chris Helms, The Enterprise; Michael Loria, USA TODAY